John downloads a music track for five minutes to a file in MP3 format for his own use. What size (in Megabytes) will the MP3 file need to be?

If his MP3 player has a memory of 5 Gigabytes, calculate an estimate of the maximum number of album tracks he can store on his portable MP3 player. Show, by estimation, how to check your answer without using a calculator.

Information on downloading

During downloading music is sampled 44 100 times each second. The size of each of these samples is 16 bits. Before it is stored in MP3 format the file is compressed to make it smaller using a ratio of 12:1.

8 bits are equal to 1 byte

1 Megabyte (MB) is equal to 1 048 576 bytes

1 Gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1 073 741824 bytes

1 Gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1 024 Megabytes (MB)

2. Standard form problems

a. The mass of a hydrogen atom is 1.7 x 10-24 g. One litre of air contains 2.5 x 1022 atoms of hydrogen.